not much to say about this one. unless nvidia does something to drop prices down to ati levels, ati has won this round. nvidia still has the fastest performing card out though, even if it is for a hefty premium.

the point is that gtx280 wasn't made for with a gx2 model in mind, i mean, just think about it: reduce the die to 55nm, thats -25% cost to produce the chip(half node reduction), only the chip, but lets just say it goes for the whole board so we'll have what? a dual gtx 280 that would cost 900$, BUY THAT! i really don't think the market is and ever will be ready for a single video card costing that much no matter how much the performance

2-3 month ago: nvidia is preparing for new giant monolithic GPU launch. at the moment data leaked from ATi showed hd4000 series will have 480 stream processors. as you can see in most of ATi documents represented that4850 at 199$ will compete with 8800GT and 9600GT and4870 at 299$ willl Compete with 9800GTX.so nvidia thought about 9800GTX+(a new higher clock 55nm G92) maybe at 300$ and cut their 9800GTX,8800GT prices down to 270,170 respectively to demolish entire hd4800 line.

two weeks ago: while nvidia is proud to present most powerfull single GPU graphic solution, GTX280,GTX260 - 1.4Bil transistor monsters with almost 600mm2 die size and high price tags 650 and 400$, things go dangerous on nvidia's camp becausenew data leaked from new hd4000 line presented they both have 800 stream processors and only 267mm2 die size!

one week ago: first benches of new hd4850 is comming.just amazing score for a 199$ card. man it's faster than 9800GTX almost by 5 precent. nvidia quickly cut 100$ on GTX prices to 199$ and stated that they have a superior product than 4850(it's GTX+) at 230$,they even send it to review websites 1 month before launch!Ati didnt want to yield the market to nvidia,they optimized their drivers(8.6-hotfix) so 4850 became on par or a tad faster than still not lanched 230$ 9800GTX+!

3 days back: Ati today presented their hd4870. a 4850 with higher core clock and massive GDDR5 memory running at 3.6Ghz!what a card! it's faster than recently 400$ nvidia GTX260 and only 10% slower than 650$ most powerfull GPU on earth at only impressive 299$ price tag.

today: well, first i have to say "it's true, most powerfull GPU still is GTX280" but at 650$ and it simply dosent make sense.it's mean you pay 120 percent more to raise performance bar by 10 percentfeature wise again ATi has his hand upon nvidia due to directx 10.1 support, 7.1 HD losless sound through HDMI,...honestly these are features that pleased alot of people.

nvidia in near future:well they loose this round.1.cut down their 9800GTX+ to 199$ in order to compete to 48502.they cant bring GTX260 price lower than it's now because 600mm2 Die producing costs is very high but they can move to 55nm to raise clocks and cut prices(remember fx5800 and fx5900)as you may thought again comepition to 4870 will be too tough for green tim3.GTX280 with 55nm maybe at 450$ to encourage people buying it

ATi in near future: crown is at red tim now.4850 and 4870's are near perfect products so Ati dosnt have alot to do than sit back and see how hd4000 sells like hot cakes. besides they can:1.optimize their drivers better and better and better.2.optimze crossfire performance(again better drivers).3.utilize GPU Phisics with Havoc as soon as possible(man, alot of best games out there are using havoc)(again drivers)4.make their R700 to dethrone GTX280 from being fastest at 450$.

next gerneration well if nvidia GT200 products were 3 months old , it can be said that next kings will be nvidia cards but both companyrelease thire new generation almost at same time,so we cant determine who is next dominator.

AMD *if AMD Continues like this at CPU's we can have high hopes for uppcomming shanghai.*at mobile we still don't konw much about puma performance and battery life but it's lanch is BIG and partners are vast.*we are starting to see alot of big one's using ATi mobility dedicated GPU's like : next generation HP,Sony,Toshiba,... in their notebooks.*man it's a good time to buy AMD stock

Well nvidia won the battle for like 2 yrs and now amd are taking over.Its not just the price of the card to consider but also the power and the price u will have to pay for the power.Nvidia will have to 1st make the gpu smaller to lower the power supply.Then nvidia will have to update the amount of cores running on it.But this quater i think has been won by AMD.But i am not saying yet cause i am sure nvidia will have something going next year and AMD are not to stand by.The most interesting question is AMD vs INTEL.Are we going to see any die changes and speeds.Its not just a question of cpu's or gpu's but also the bus interface and the AMD 790 is looking good.Last not least is the new gpu physics chips

It will be very interesting, especially when DAAMIT is changing to a 6-month refresh-technology cycle.This puts even more pressure on nVidia to bring out cards with more feature support.I am talking about DX10.1/SM4.1 and 7.1 audio through HDMI.

So far, nVidia is only being able to "bribe" reviewers, press and some developers (Assassin's Creed scandal, not really proven but come on this is large writing on the wall) to make their cards look better, while DAAMIT has been really good with innovation, rich feature set, low price and high performance.

Also, DAAMIT is highly successful with the fresh professional market and that is thanks to the technological implementation of their shaders. They literally crushed nVidia with performance and much much cheeper cards.

They don't need to rework the cooling, the GPUs are allowed to get that hot in order to keep noise down. ATI obviously feels that 80-90C isn't anything to worry about. (For those of you thinking 90C is hot enough to seriously shorten the lifespan of the card, remember, the 8800GT gets that hot, too.)

Oh I know the GT does, as well as several other cards in the past.. the problem is those cards effect system temperatures to. There are other factors to.. Fan doesn't ramp up or literally dies (as they are notorious for doing) then what?

I'd like to see a fast performing card that doesn't heat your home as well. You know?

In theory yes, In practice mmmm not so much. This is NOT a stab at ATI, but at video cards in general. Both ATI and NVIDIA need to start looking at ways of making their chips cooler. Their partners NEED to make sure they implement halfways decent cooling solutions.

Can't find it anymore, but not so long ago, me and a friend saw a clip on Youtube with a ATI Radeon (X800 I think). The guy in the clip put the card in WITHOUT(!) cooling at all, except for an open cabinet. He ran some 3D application/s, and got 128 deg. Celsius!! (That's where it flattened out). NO problems at all! If I remember correct, there was a cut, stepping some time forward in time. Still running :))))

How long until a die-shrunk GT2xx comes out and they can put 2 of those on a card and perhaps bring out a (not even sure if this is possible, may need more than a little work to achieve) GDDR5 version?

Nvidia still have the single card performance leader after all, lets not get too excited? :-s

I never quite understand why people get so wound up over one company "laying the snacks down" and "canning someone's whooped bottom" so much.

The best thing that could happen is that we have 2 companies producing cards that are pretty close in performance, driving down prices and increasing performance by leaps and bounds every generation, not a K.O. surely?

At the risk of having my comment unread on the actual review, I just wanted to congratulate Anand and Derek on an extremely well put together review! While I'm not a hardware or software engineer and can only pretend I know all of what you're explaining in the article, what I was able to gather gave some great insights into both the RV770 and GTX200 architectures.

Now, if AMD/ATI can just introduce a 4870X2 at or under the $500 price point, things could get extremely interesting.

While ATI has used GDDR4, the marginal speed increase over high-clocking binned GDDR3 is offset by the higher latencies. GDDR4 usually clocks in the 1000-1200 MHz range on reference designs... That is not uncommon for high-clocked GDDR3, which still retains better latencies (albeit at higher power consumption).

GDDR5 is in effect almost QDDR (900 MHz GDDR5 = 3600 MHz GDDR3 effective speed) while providing a nice reduction in power requirements. Case in point:

Actually video cards have some of the highest margins.... and with the current good yields ATI is getting off the RV770 series, they will make a lot of money this quarter and potentially up to Q1'09. Buying AMD stock, wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

ATI's revenues are about $6B/year. Sales of high-end cards usually top out at a few hundred thousand units per year. If you work out the fraction of total revenues, you'll see its fairly small, even though the margins are higher.

They always make more money from going to OEM market, that is were they make the big bucks from. I was also hinting that AMD makes most of its money from other sources besides video cards in general. Low powered CPU, etc.

That kind of performance for $300 is just very pissing me off for what I've paid, its pretty safe to say AMD won this round, follow up reviews is a must, the numbers will change as drivers come out. In 2 months (for drivers, we get them every month or so) the card may very well be able to match the 280. Now Crossfire reviews...

The Radeon 4870 wins 4 out of 7 at 1680x1050 and is half the cost of the GTX280.

I personally still would go with the Radeon 4850 just because I dont see any game up here that requires anything higher other than crysis to which I will probably wait until my next video card after this to play crysis. Its just one game.

I would also like to see Assassin's Creed with the DX10.1 patch applied because once NVIDIA has DX10.1 this will tell us what these games will do when the patch is finally allowed by NVIDIA.

I do wish they would even seperate out the SLI/XF benchmarks. I no longer have any interest in doing a dual card config unless both chips are on the same card so I still have to weed through the benchmarks. Not a big deal but I suspect more people are running a single card not duals.

At a local FRY's store, they have the HD 4850 cards going for $180 off the shelf!

I almost bought it. The price is good, its right there in a small box. I was originally looking at paying $130 for the 9600GT 2 months ago for my upgrade over my OLD 7600GT, so the $50 extra would be worth it.

But I didn't buy it because of its single-slot cooling system that is NOISY (as they have said in the reviews).

So I may opt for a 4870 or wait for more 4850 cards to come ot market.

The thermal paste shipped with stock graphics cards and CPUs is notoriously low quality. I saw a review (can't remember from who) where they lowered the temps (and as a result, noise) on the 4850 by 10 to 15 degrees C, simply by removing the original paste and replacing with Arctic Silver Ceramique (small syringe retails for less than $10).

I did the same thing on my 2900XT (but using Arctic Silver 5), and now the fan never revs up over 33% (way quieter).

It seems the performance of the 4870 dives at high resolutions OR med-hi res + AA. Meanwhile the 1GB of memory equipped GTX 280 doesn't seem similarly affected. The obvious bottleneck of the 4870 is the 512MB of memory then. So will there be a 1GB version? (I have read in the previous months that the 4870 is supposed to come in 512MB and 1024MB versions).

With the effects the game is trying to do, it's pushed way pass the abilities of yesterdays and todays video cards.

It's amazing, when Crysis first came out - a $600 GeForce 8800GTX was the best in town. Now a $200 video card is even faster. Sometimes its less than $200.

Play a UT3 game which also looks great, but not the same tech shows some possible problems with Crysis - but how many games have the vegatiation level? Hell, UT3 ran at about 35fps (1024x768 MAX details) on a GF7600GT and AMD x2 3800, not bad.

I've played Crysis on a 3850 card in med/High details on 1280x900 res, it looks great and played well. How much better is MAX details?

How did the Crysis team develop this game back in the day when the best was the ATI 1900 and GF 7800 cards?

Look on the bright side by the time a mainstream video card plays the game at decent rates it will be on the $4.99 bargain shelf.

Plenty of other games to play in the mean time.

Actually what I dont like is why cant they take resolutions down on each video card until the game plays at 30fps and 60fps. For instance lets say the radeon 3850 plays the game at 1024x768 at 30FPS instead of showing it will play at 2FPS at 763427861726 x 76482394 resolution. The way the review sites portray the game you would think no video card exists that you can play the game on.

You know If I knew what resolution I could play the game at decent frame rates I might have bought the game. This is poor execution on the part of the review sites. Ok so I can only play it at 1024x768 thats fine by me. Arent games supposed to be about gameplay? I can name plenty of pretty games that are horrible to play.

If you have a TFT, as you should by now anyway, then you only want to play it at native resolution.

The game does have lower quality settings and is playable on many cards now - there is no excuse to not buy it. Or try the demo at least... don't just judge it by video card benchmarks.

These articles are focusing on the hardware, trying to stress it out the most, to show what it is capable of and where it tops out - it is not at all a review of the games, their prettiness or gameplay. So I don't see why your comment winded up in this direction.